Guitarist/vocalist Dean Wareham is no stranger to the cult of success or the success of cult.

His first band, Galaxie 500, was
obsessively followed by a small coterie of fans who grew with each
independent release and, like the similarly configured Velvet
Underground, ultimately became much more an influence on subsequent
musical generations than a commercial triumph.

Wareham’s next band venture, Luna, was a Dream Pop band that garnered a major label contract and a fair amount of acclaim (Rolling Stone cited their third album, Penthouse, as one of the essential albums of the ’90s). After a dozen years in various permutations, Luna split in 2005.

Bassist/vocalist Britta Phillips joined
Luna in 2000 and became romantically involved with Wareham. When the
band split, the pair remained together both personally (they married in
2006) and professionally (as Dean & Britta). They returned to a more
low-profile stance, periodically releasing albums and working on scores
for small, low budget films like The Squid and the Whale.

Four years ago, Wareham was approached
with an intriguing proposition by Ben Harrison, Performing Arts Curator
for Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. Harrison was looking for someone to
compose a soundtrack of sorts for a series of filmed portraits Warhol
shot in the mid-’60s.

Warhol had referred to the silent black
and white films as “screen tests,” aiming his camera at a broad spectrum
of subjects, from Factory figures like Billy Face and Edie Sedgwick to
the Velvet Underground to relatively unknown acquaintances, filming
close to 500 of the moving portraits from 1964-1966.

Being a huge Luna fan, Wareham was the
first artist Harrison contacted about the possibility of creating music
to accompany Warhol’s films.

“Sometimes it’s like, ‘I’m so lucky that I
got hired to do this,’ but it’s not all luck; in the larger scheme,
we’re somewhat appropriate for it,” Wareham says. “The films are all
four minutes long and when Ben started thinking about someone to score
them, he thought that four minutes suggests songs rather than (a)
score.”

Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests,” a live presentation of Warhol’s
portraits projected on a large screen while Wareham, Phillips,
keyboardist Matt Sumrow and drummer Anthony Lamarca perform the songs
live. The performance was filmed for a 2009 DVD and D&B released a
double album’s worth of the songs’ studio translations.

The full quartet has been touring the
show intermittently over the past four years, all of which is amazing to
Wareham. He never saw the project going beyond a few Warhol Museum
performances.

“I don’t think they were expecting it to
have this kind of life and neither were we,” Wareham says. “Ben said,
‘You’ll do it here in Pittsburgh and maybe another eight to 10 shows.’
Thursday night we were in Pittsburgh for our 75th show. People like the
show and it works.”

The process began with Wareham and
Phillips reviewing Warhol’s screen tests and picking 30-40 from the
archive of 150 that have been transferred. Then, they whittled tests
down to the final 13 portraits, a process which took about six months.

“When you score a film, you can put in
any old instrument you want. The assignment was to perform it live, so
we had to be aware that we were going to be a four piece band on stage,”
Wareham says. “And for this, the music was continuous — when you score a
film, the music goes in and out and there’s a lot of silence and
dialogue. This was kind of like making a music video, but making it
backwards, where we had the video first and put a song to it. Some are
instrumental. They’re not all songs.”

From there, the methodology for creating
the music for each film was as individual as the films themselves.
Wareham and Phillips started by reading about and connecting to the
portrait subjects (including actor Dennis Hopper, an early advocate of
Warhol’s art, and dancer Freddie Herka, who committed suicide just two
months after his screen test), leading to an eventual musical
understanding of their films.

“We wanted to take people who were there
every day and important in Warhol’s life rather than some famous person
who happened to pass through The Factory for the day,” Wareham says. “We
would look at them and try something we had recorded already or try
someone else’s song to see what it was like. Some (songs), we would sit
there with the full band playing over and over to the same thing. The
process was different for each of the 13.”

Wareham admits he was slightly
intimidated about adding his own creative input to Warhol’s artistic
expression. Once he got into the process, his reticence was replaced by
the same sense of purpose that drove Warhol.

“I was intimidated, because it’s a
different world,” Wareham says. “Intimidated to be going into museums
(and) to be performing not just to fans who come to my gigs to hear my
songs. Half of them are there for that, half are there for the Warhol
films. And the question of Warhol’s intent is kind of interesting. The
ones of the Velvet Underground were shot to project on them while they
performed, so those were intended to be set to music.

“When you study Warhol, I think he would have felt comfortable with it. I don’t think he was precious about these things.”

So far, “13 Beautiful Songs” has been a
small part of the larger Dean & Britta touring structure. The group
performs its standard show for a few dates and mixes in a few Warhol
shows along the way. For Wareham, one of the great appeals of 13 Most
Beautiful was simply the opportunity to experience Warhol’s amazing
portraits.

“You get to see these films on a large
screen and that’s unusual in itself,” he says. “If you live in
Pittsburgh, you get to see them at the museum because they show Warhol
films regularly. Otherwise, the only way people see these is at a
gallery, where there will be a room with TV sets. But when you look at
them that way, you tend to walk in and stand in front of them for 10
seconds and move on. This is a rare opportunity to see them projected.”